Stunning Life-Size Photos Capture Close Encounters With Whales

Bryant Austin and Sperm Whale Composite One

Photographer Bryant Austin stands with a composite of Enigma, on display in Tokyo. The 20-foot long photo is the first life-size image of a sperm whale Austin produced.
Bryant Austin/studio: cosmos

Humpback Mother and Calf, Ha'apai Islands

Bryant Austin photographed this pair of whales during an early field season with humpback whales near the Kingdom of Tonga (2005).
Bryant Austin/studio: cosmos

Sperm Whale Composite One

Life-size image of Enigma, Scar's cousin. The full-size photo is 5 feet tall, 20 feet long, and is the first full-size portrait composite of a whale. Crafting the composite took more than 300 hours (2009).
Bryant Austin/studio: cosmos

Sperm Whale Portrait

A close-up of Enigma's eye, captured in Dominica in 2009. This male sperm whale is Scar's cousin.
Bryant Austin/studio: cosmos

Humpback Mother and Calf II, Ha'apai Islands

Photograph taken during an early field season near the Kingdom of Tonga (2005). "My vision was to reproduce this photograph to life-size dimensions. However, it was created at a very early stage in my work and I had much to learn about just what it would take to make such a photograph possible." -- Bryant Austin
Bryant Austin/studio: cosmos

Sperm Whale Composite Two

Life-size image of a sperm whale named Scar, measuring 10 feet tall and 36 feet long (2011). The photo is a 60-gigabyte file; to create the composite, Bryant Austin had to build a computer capable of processing it. Even with 240 gigs of RAM and four hard drives, it still took 20 minutes to save the file. Bryant Austin/studio: cosmos

Mozart and His Mother

Mozart and his mother, a five-image composite that could not be brought to life-size dimensions. The first time Bryant Austin saw Mozart, he was hitching a ride by resting on his mom's dorsal fin. (2006)
Bryant Austin/studio: cosmos

Humpback Whale Calf I

Mozart, pictured above in the waters near Tonga, is the first whale Bryant Austin shot a life-size portrait of. (2006)
Bryant Austin/studio: cosmos

Sperm whale Composite Portrait One (detail)

A close-up look at one of the image files used to create Scar's composite.
Bryant Austin/studio: cosmos

Humpback Whale Mother Resting

For 20 minutes, this humpback whale rested in a vertical head-down position, slowly spinning on her vertical axis while her calf swam around her.
Bryant Austin/studio: cosmos

Austin and Ella

Bryant Austin in the water with Ella, a minke whale, near the Great Barrier Reef. Of all the whales Austin encountered, Ella was the most inquisitive, spending up to six hours in the water with Austin for several days.
Photograph by John Rumney; Bryant Austin/studio: cosmos

Minke Whale Composite One

A composite of Ella. The life-size version is 6 feet tall, 30 feet long, and comprises 15 photos shot over five days. Minkes are the most hunted whales in the world.
Bryant Austin/studio: cosmos

Enigma's Fluke

Enigma's fluke, captured in 2009.
Bryant Austin/studio: cosmos

Few people are lucky enough to have had a quiet underwater encounter with a whale.

For the rest of us, there are photos like these: Life-sized composites of sperm, humpback and minke whales, captured from less than 6 feet away. The full-size prints (and the smaller digital versions in this gallery) bring our enormous marine kindred into a nearly tactile reality, revealing the seemingly tiny folds around a whale’s inquisitive eye, the crustaceans adhering to a whale’s skin, or the color variations that make individual whales beautiful and distinct.

Composed by photographer Bryant Austin and featured in his new book, these photos reveal a blue world that’s at times vibrant, at other times serene, captured as Austin floated in snorkel gear at the surface and waited for curious whales to feel comfortable enough to approach.

“[Austin] enables those who will never put their faces in the ocean — as well as those who do — to see whales as whales see whales, inch for inch, eye for eye,” writes oceanographer Sylvia Earle in the foreword to Beautiful Whale, published in April.

Austin’s quest to produce a full-size whale portrait began in 2004, when he was swimming with humpbacks in the South Pacific. While floating near the surface, Austin felt a gentle push on his shoulder, and turned around to find himself staring into the eye of a mother humpback. She’d nudged him with one of her massive pectoral fins. Of that encounter, Austin writes, “I saw clearly what had been missing in the 35 years of whale photography: intimate moments such as these, documented at full scale and on the whales’ terms.”

By capturing these moments, he hopes to share the profound experience and inspire others to help protect the marine giants.

For five years, Austin struggled to assemble the technique and instruments necessary to produce the portraits. He quit his job and sold his house, pleaded with donors for funds. Trips to the Kingdom of Tonga, Dominica, and Australia produced alternating disappointments and elations. With an 80-mm telephoto portrait lens attached to a 50-megapixel Hasselblad H3DII-50, Austin eventually learned how to capture the massive bodies of adult whales, and assembled the images into composite portraits — a process that would require building a computer powerful enough to wrangle the massive, 60-GB images he produced.

Along the way, he met some friends. Beethoven, a humpback calf, gently rested on Austin’s back, wrapping one long flipper around the photographer during the pit of Austin’s frustration. A curious minke named Ella spent days with him in Australia. In Dominica, sperm whales — those apex, toothed predators — dexterously maneuvered around Austin, avoiding knocking into him with their multi-tonned flippers. One young whale, after swimming alongside Austin while he snapped photos, spat a foot-long piece of squid tentacle in the photographer’s direction.

The otherwise deliberate movements of this large predator left Austin wondering if the whale had offered the squid as a gift.